How to Grow Sweet Potato in Containers or Pots

g'day i'm mike from self-sufficient me and i can grow a ton of sweet potato we've got plenty of space so why would i be bothered growing sweet potato in a container well a lot of you guys out in the youtubes you don't have a big backyard in fact many of you live in apartments or have small courtyards and i thought you know what let's do an experiment on how you can grow sweet potato in a container so i can prove to you that you don't need a huge acreage or backyard to grow this tuber let's get into it [Music] now before we empty this pot into this wheelbarrow here to see what harvest we got let me go through a bit of a background story on the setup of this container which isn't hard by the way the container itself is a cheap plastic container but it is quite large it's at least a foot across or 40 centimeters because i wanted maximum growing space and if you limit your area or space of course you're going to get less produce and because you're going to be growing it for such a long time you might as well make it worth it so i think dedicating a large container is a good idea having said that if you just wanted to grow it for the leaves only as they substitute to spinach or if you're growing up for the first time and you want to experiment go something half the size of this let it grow up a trellis or sprawl out over a balcony and just harvest the leaves and then harvest the tuber i suppose at the end of that season you also want to allow at least 30 centimeters or just under a foot depth in one of these containers so you want to have the surface area and i'll explain why in a second but yeah you want to have a bit of depth because the sweet potato will put down tubers underneath the ground and if you don't have enough depth you'll push those tubers out and upwards they can get sunburned but they can also be attractive to rats and mice so it's good to have enough soil there to cover them and of course the more medium or soil you have the more nourishment and nutrients that plant can get and the bigger that plant can get and grow even if you are just growing sweet potato for mainly the leaves you can see i made this teepee out of some steaks you don't have to do that you could put some trellising material or something like that around it in fact i did have some trellising material as well around this but that wasn't for the vine to grow on that was to protect this blooming thing from possums because possums love the shoots or the slips that you put down to start this plant off they're young and tender i hope the possums haven't the plants so much that we get a poor harvest that's yet to be seen so if we do i'm gonna blame the possums just for effect in this video i tied it up here to show you that you can just train it up a tp or a trellis and it will happily then grow itself up you can just start it won't necessarily attach to a trellis it's not like a gourd vine or a cucumber vine or grapevine that sends out tendrils that attaches itself sweet potato will just generally sprawl up and grow over things but it prefers to sprawl out along the ground and when it does that this is the reason why i like a large surface area in a pot when those vines sprawl out they re-shoot down and those shoots down underneath the vine when it takes root can turn into more tubers the type of medium i used in this pot here was a good quality potting mix premium potting mix you could make your own compost potting mix up i just purchased a bag of good quality stuff and then over the period of the last six months every month or so i'd sprinkle a little bit of blood and bone or chicken manure around the base of the plant to help it grow and sustain it how did i start this off well you started off typically using slips and where did i get my slips from i pulled out a whole heap of sweet potato from one of the beds that i was going to plant garlic in when i did that i left some sweet potato behind which you'd naturally do because you can't seem to ever get rid of it especially in this type of climate this plant will grow off tubers it'll grow off its own runners and it will also take root when the vine spreads out if you don't have yours growing in the wild like me that you can just harvest from your garden what you can do is you can put a tuber in a glass put some water in it and over time that will grow its own shoots as well then it's just a matter of harvesting those slips when you do grow them no matter which way you do and then just pushing them into the pot at about i don't know 15 to 20 centimeters apart or closer it doesn't really matter and they should take hold okay let's harvest this sucker take this vine off pull this out this is going to be a bit of a lift that's what i'm talking about check it look at that there you go that's interesting isn't it look at that root ball right to the bottom look at how tight that is the roots of just all the way through here we go cool what's that some creature it's a nice looking tube it's not that big but it's crisp and hard you can tell it'll be very nice this is a purple variety some people prefer the orange variety because it's a little sweeter this is more like a normal potato where it's not as sweet and they're very good for potato chips okay switching back over to the top i don't want to waste this soil i want to keep as much of it as possible it can just go straight into a garden bed or i can reuse this potting mix you know get rid of most of the roots i suppose and reuse it for more plants another small one there's a couple twisted ones there you can see how it sent them all the way down into the bottom here into the middle of this mass small little tubers to survive later on even if that plant is now grazed down it'll all shoot back up [Music] that looks like about all i'm going to get out of this which is a little bit disappointing but it doesn't matter because my view wasn't to show you how to grow a ton in a container and i'll talk a little bit to finalize this on why i think the harvest was down but what i wanted to get across was that you can indeed grow sweet potatoes in containers so there you go you can see it's not heaps but it is a feed at least for a family and i know what some of you are thinking that wasn't worth it six months growing there in that spot and yeah i think you're right it probably isn't if you are wanting to harvest the sweet potato tubers but there is a few excuses first of all i did have to combat the possums all right so that was an issue secondly i made this experiment down the back here and to be quite honest i didn't water it enough we had a really really as you would know if you watch my videos terrible winter and summer and we didn't get a lot of rain until this last month i had to try to keep or remember to get the water up to it if i was to do this experiment over again what i would do which would make heaps more tubers and make that grow much more vigorous would be to put in a little watering system to make sure that it gets water constantly it's in a good spot it gets plenty enough sun and all that it just never got enough love i think to make it flourish and when you're growing in containers one thing that is an issue and always will be especially in the smaller pots like that you think that's a large pot but it's still just a pot and it's plastic and they heat up is roots drying out and the whole pot drying out i noticed just about every second day through summer this plant was suffering and the leaves were drooping and i'd walk over and i'd give it a hand water to revitalize it again and that's really not a way you should be growing you should be giving that plant water every day if it needs it especially a plant that loves water it's not surprising to me that i didn't get a huge harvest but remember you can still grow this for the leaves even if you're disappointed in the harvest you could have been harvesting leaves from that for four to six months and that is another great use for it so just don't think that this was all in vain and experiment gone wrong this is exactly the way to grow sweet potato in a pot and even though i disappointingly can't show you the glory i can still at least show you what you can get and possibly even more if you do things the right way so you can indeed grow sweet potato in a pot and the good thing is sweet potato being a warm loving crop if you're living in a cool climate well then if you're growing in containers and put in a greenhouse or move that container around to warm spots as the temperature changes or as you move into the cooler months you can extend that season by moving that pot to warmer places that way you can still get a good feed of sweet potato or use the leaves of this fantastic vegetable even though it really shouldn't be growing in your climate well i hope you enjoyed this video if you did make sure you give it a big sweet ass thumbs up in a container thanks a lot for watching bye for now it's still very crisp you know lovely look listen to this and look at that so not a great harvest but quality harvest hey there you go

Channel: Self Sufficient Me

Views: 1,105,805

Keywords: how to grow sweet potato in containers, how to grow sweet potato in pots, how to grow sweet potato, growing sweet potato in a container, can you grow sweet potato in containers, sweet potato, growing sweet potato, container, sweet potatoes, sweet potato slips, planting sweet potato slips, planting sweet potato in containers, sweet potato growing tips, sweet potato tips

Id: c7UiVtlZsUo

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 01 2020